A Bridge Restores a Lifeline to a Battered Town

Tuesday

May 29, 2007 at 5:35 AM

A new span across the copper-colored St. Louis Bay is a hopeful link to the return of better days.

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss., May 24 — Sometimes a bridge is more than just a bridge. The new span across the copper-colored St. Louis Bay connects today’s diminished reality to memories of a more generous past, a hopeful link to the return of better days.

The soaring bridge was dedicated last week amid jubilation in a ceremony attended by hundreds, 20 months after Hurricane Katrina blew out the old span. That tangible sign of pushing forward and of a quickening pace — commutes now are drastically shortened — has left people in this battered waterfront town of 8,000 quietly giddy about a future recently in doubt.

And it has ended the isolation, physical and mental, of a place that once considered itself a jewel of the Gulf Coast, a sun-baked collection of picturesque old frame houses that Hurricane Katrina smashed, then severed from its brethren to the east. The surge from the storm wiped out the concrete bridge carrying U.S. Highway 90 that had stood for a half-century.

The recovery is creeping along. Wind off the bay is still the loudest noise in the empty-seeming downtown, whistling through ruined buildings and banging loose siding. Before the storm Bay St. Louis was a favored seaside retreat for New Orleanians — the historian Stephen E. Ambrose had lived and written here before his death in 2002 — and, coming from the east, a genteel respite from the garishness of Biloxi’s casinos.

The 30-foot surge from Hurricane Katrina destroyed about half the houses here. But looming now in the distance is the sparkling two-lane bridge with its whizzing cargo of cars and promise of new life. Some here spoke of cruising across the new two-mile span, for the sheer pleasure of it. It is the latest sign of the region’s slow renaissance, and a rare example of efficient government intervention.

“It’s major, psychologically,” said Alicein Chambers, who opened the Mockingbird Cafe a year after the storm. “It just feels like we’re moving, we’re making progress, we’re going forward.” Before, “we were all just on this little cut-off island,” she said; now, “we’re happy to be part of the coast again.” It galled residents to shop for building supplies across the Louisiana state line.

The partly illusory feeling of isolation — the east-west Interstate 10, just 10 miles to the north, has been available throughout — was nonetheless pervasive. The old way of communicating with the neighbors in Pass Christian and Biloxi, first by way of the wooden bridge of the 1920s, then the concrete one of the 1950s, had been wiped out. And a seven-minute dash across the bay had turned into a 45-minute commute.

“After the storm, we were an island unto ourselves,” said Brian Rushing, a minister at the First Baptist Church. “We truly have been isolated from the rest of the Gulf Coast community.”

The bridge-builders worked like demons, completing in 10 months what normally might take twice as long, working at night under floodlights and booming the pile drivers during the day. The new bridge rises 85 feet above the bay at its highest point, 55 feet more than the old.

For weeks the contractor, Granite Archer Western, worked around the clock on the $267 million bridge. “He pulled out all the stops,” said the chief engineer in Mississippi’s highway department, Harry Lee James. Only a few cranks in town complained about the constant noise.

“Most people, it would not have mattered what they were doing, it was O.K. with them,” said the town’s mayor, Eddie Favre, a cousin of the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre. “People saw it as an absolute necessity.”

The place has a long way to go, and the mayor’s relaxed post-Katrina garb — in a style common all over the coast right after the storm, but since discarded in most places — is testimony to the fact: a Hawaiian shirt adorned with cocktail glasses and the words, ‘It’s 5 o’clock Somewhere,’ sneakers and the shorts he has vowed to wear until Bay St. Louis is back on its feet.

Mayor Favre is still living in a trailer, and the old City Hall downtown is still empty. He has moved municipal functions to a former utility company building on the highway. Downtown, on a deserted street, an injunction scrawled on a vacant frame house — “Please respect our loss. Do not enter” — seems superfluous, as there is nobody around to read it.

With the fancy dwellings on the beach wiped out, property tax revenue fell by half. Sales tax revenue dropped by more than two-thirds. Though Bay St. Louis is now reunited with its neighbor on the other side of the water, precious little is waiting in Pass Christian: that old resort city is still mostly a tabula rasa on its once-proud beachfront.

Still, the reopened galleries on Main Street in Bay St. Louis, hopefully painted and primped, are waiting, and some claim an uptick in traffic already.

“It’s more than emotional,” said Dave Moynan of Maggie May’s. “It’s starting to translate into dollars.” There was precious little arts-and-crafts shopping on a recent quiet midweek afternoon, though.